Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Once again, the rabbi rises to his feet, drawing everyone’s attention as they wait for him to fall down. But he doesn’t. “I have composed a message in German naval jargon. Translated into English, it says, roughly, ‘Interrogation of prisoners proceeding slowly request permission to use torture’ and then there are several Xs in a row and then is added the words WARNING AMBUSH U-691 HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY BRITISH COMMANDOS.’ ”

  Sharp intakes of breath all around the room.

  “Is contemporary German naval jargon a normal part of Talmudic studies?” asks the don.

  “Mr. Kahn has spent a year and a half analyzing naval decrypts in Hut 4,” Chattan says. “He has the lingo down pat.” He goes on: “We have encrypted Mr. Kahn’s message using today’s naval Enigma key, and passed it on to Mr. Shales, who has been practicing.”

  Miss Lord rises to her feet, like a child reciting her lessons in a Victorian school, and says, “I am satisfied that Mr. Shales’s rendition is indistinguishable from U-691’s.”

  All eyes turn towards Chattan, who turns towards the old farts from the Broadway Buildings, who even now are on the phone relaying all this to someone of whom they are clearly terrified.

  “Don’t the Jerrys have huffduff?” asks the don, as if probing a flaw in a student’s dissertation.

  “Their huffduff network is not nearly so well developed as ours,” responds one of the young analysts. “It is most unlikely that they would bother to triangulate a transmission that appeared to come from one of their own U-boats, so they probably won’t figure out the message originated in Buckinghamshire, rather than the Atlantic.”

  “However, we have anticipated your objection,” Chattan says, “and made arrangements for several of our own ships, as well as various aeroplanes and ground units, to flood the air with transmissions. Their huffduff network will have its hands full at the time of our fake U-691 transmission.”

  “Very well,” mutters the don.

  Everyone sits there in churchly silence while the most senior of the Broadway Buildings contingent winds up his conversation with Who Is at the Other End. After hanging up the phone, he intones solemnly, “You are directed to proceed.”

  Chattan nods at some of the younger men, who dash across the room, pick up telephones, and begin to talk in calm, clinical voices about cricket scores. Chattan looks at his watch. “It will take a few minutes for the huffduff smokescreen to develop. Miss Lord, you will notify us when the traffic has risen to a suitably feverish pitch?”

  Miss Lord makes a little curtsey and sits down at her radio.

  “FUNKSPIEL!” shouts Elmer, scaring everyone half out of their skins. “We already done sent out some other messages. Made ’em look like Royal Navy traffic. Used a code the Krauts just broke a few weeks ago. These messages have to do with an operation—a fictitious operation, y’know—in which a German U-boat was supposedly boarded and seized by our commandos.”

  There is a whole lot of tinny shouting from the telephone. The gentleman who has the bad luck to be holding it translates into what is probably more polite English: “What if Mr. Shales’s performance is not convincing to the radio operators at Charlottenburg? What if they do not succeed in decrypting Mr. Elmer’s false messages?”

  Chattan fields that one. He steps over to a map that has been set up on an easel at the end of the room. The map depicts a swath of the Central Atlantic bordered on the east by France and Spain. “U-691’s last reported position was here,” he says, pointing to a pin stuck in the lower left corner of the map. “She has been ordered back to Wilhelmshaven with her prisoners. She will go this way,” he says, indicating a length of red yarn stretched in a north-northeasterly direction, “assuming she avoids the Straits of Dover.*

  “There happens to be another milchcow here,” Chattan continues, indicating another pin. “One of our own submarines should be able to reach it within twenty-four hours, at which point it will approach at periscope depth and engage it with torpedoes. Chances are excellent that the milchcow will be destroyed immediately. If she has time to send out any transmissions, she will merely state that she is being attacked by a submarine. Once we have destroyed this milchcow, we will call once again upon the skills of Mr. Shales, who will transmit a fake distress call that will appear to originate from the milchcow, stating that they have come under attack from none other than U-691.”

  “Splendid!” someone proclaims.

  “By the time the sun rises tomorrow,” Chattan concludes, “we will have one of our very best submarine-hunting task forces on the scene. A light carrier with several antisubmarine planes will comb the ocean night and day, using radar, visual reconnaissance, huffduff, and Leigh lights to hunt for U-691. The chances are excellent that she will be found and sunk long before she can approach the Continent. But should she find her way past this formidable barrier, she will find the German Kriegsmarine no less eager to hunt her down and destroy her. Any information she may transmit to Admiral Dönitz in the meantime will be regarded with the most profound suspicion.”

  “So,” Waterhouse says, “the plan, in a nutshell, is to render all information from U-691 unbelievable, and subsequently to destroy her, and everyone on her, before she can reach Germany.”

  “Yes,” Chattan says, “and the former task will be greatly simplified by the fact that U-691’s skipper is already known to be mentally unstable.”

  “So it seems likely that our guys, Shaftoe and Root, will not survive,” Waterhouse says slowly.

  There is a long, frozen silence, as if Waterhouse had interrupted high tea by making farting sounds with his armpit.

  Chattan responds in a precise, arch tone that indicates he’s really pissed off. “There is the possibility that when U-691 is engaged by our forces, she will be forced to the surface and will surrender.”

  Waterhouse studies the grain of the tabletop. His face is hot and his chest is burning.

  Miss Lord rises to her feet and speaks. Several important heads turn toward Mr. Shales, who excuses himself and goes to a table in the corner of the room. He fiddles with the controls on a radio transmitter for a few moments, spreads the encrypted message out in front of himself, and takes a deep breath, as though preparing for a big solo. Finally he reaches out, rests one hand lightly on the radio key, and begins to tap out the message, rocking from side to side and cocking his head this way and that. Mrs. Lord listens with her eyes closed, concentrating intensely.

  Mr. Shales stops. “Finished,” he announces in a quiet voice, and looks nervously at Mrs. Lord, who smiles. Then there is polite applause around the library, as if they had just finished listening to a harpsichord concerto. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse keeps his hands folded in his lap. He has just heard the death warrant of Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe.

  HEAP

  * * *

  To: root@eruditorum.org

  From: dwarf@siblings.net

  Subject: Re(8) Why?

  Let me just take stock of what I know so far: you say that asking “why?” is part of what you do for a living; you’re not an academic; and you are in the surveillance business. I am having trouble forming a clear picture.

  —BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK——

  (etc.)

  ——END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK——

  To: dwarf@siblings.net

  From: root@eruditorum.org

  Subject: Re(9) Why?

  Randy,

  I never said that I, myself, am in the surveillance business. But I know people who are. Formerly public- and now private-sector. We stay in touch. The grapevine and all that. Nowadays, my involvement in such things is limited to noodling around with novel cryptosystems, as a sort of hobby.

  Now, to get back to what I would consider to be the main thread of our conversation. You guessed that I was an academic. Were you being sincere, or was this purely an attempt to “gotcha” me?

  The reason I ask is that I am, in fact, a man of the cloth, so naturally I consider it my job to ask “why?” I assumed this would b
e fairly obvious to you. But I should have taken into account that you are not the churchy type. This is my fault.

  It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting.

  But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.

  I still think of this as the priest’s highest calling—or at least the most interesting part of the job—hence my question to you, which I cannot fail to notice, remains unanswered.

  ——BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK——

  (etc.)

  ——END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK——

  “Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?”

  This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging around with Avi. “The Holocaust,” Randy says dutifully.

  Even if he didn’t know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint. The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone back to the Foote Mansion to prepare for hostilities with the Dentist. Randy and Avi are sitting on a black obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.

  Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on, and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear view of the sky. “Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?”

  “Uh… enhancing shareholder value?”

  “Very funny.” Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does rarely. Also, he’s in the midst of cataloging another small-h holocaust site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some fucking solemnity here. “I visited Mexico a few weeks ago,” Avi continues.

  “Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?” Randy asks.

  “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m fighting,” Avi says, even more irritated. “No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves.”

  “The Aztecs can go fuck themselves,” Randy says cheerfully, drawing a baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.

  “To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs controlled.” Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. “I was looking,” Avi continues, “for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?”

  Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. “Something unspeakable?”

  “I hate that word ‘unspeakable.’ We must speak of it.”

  “Speak then.”

  “The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days.”

  “Why?”

  “Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don’t know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that’s why.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re about to come down on the side of the Spaniards.”

  “As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them,” Avi says, “but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there.”

  “Avi?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are sitting here in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, trying to build a data haven while fending off an oral surgeon-turned-hostile-take-over-maven. I have pressing responsibilities in the Philippines. Why are we discussing the Aztecs?”

  “I’m giving you a pep talk,” Avi says. “You are bored. Dangerously so. The Pinoy-gram thing was cool for a while, but now it’s up and running, there’s no new technology there.”

  “True.”

  “But the Crypt is amazingly cool. Tom and John and Eb are going nuts, and every Secret Admirer in the world is spamming me with resumes. The Crypt is exactly what you would like to be doing right now.”

  “Again, true.”

  “Even if you were working on the Crypt, though, philosophical issues would be gnawing at you—issues based on the types of people who you see getting involved, who may be our first customers.”

  “I cannot deny that I have philosophical issues,” Randy says. Suddenly he has come up with a new hypothesis: Avi is actually root@eruditorum.org.

  “Instead, you are laying cable in the Philippines. This is a job that—because of changes we just became aware of yesterday—is basically irrelevant to our corporate mission. But it’s a lingering contractual obligation, and if we put anyone less important than you on it, the Dentist will be able to prove to the most half-witted jury of tofu-brained Californians that we are malingering.”

  “Well, thank you for making it so clear why I should be miserable,” Randy says forbearingly.

  “So,” Avi continues, “I wanted to let you know that you aren’t necessarily just making license plates here. And furthermore that the Crypt is not a morally bankrupt endeavor. Actually, you are playing a big role in the most important thing in the world.”

  Randy says, “You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is ‘to prevent future Holocausts.’ ”

  Avi laughs darkly. “I’m glad it’s obvious to you, my friend. I was beginning to think I was the only one.”

  “What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust all the time.”

  “Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.”

  “I take it you do not share this view, Avi?”

  “Look at Bosnia!” Avi scoffs. “Human nature doesn’t change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that.” He snaps his fingers.

  “So what hope is there?”

  “Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts, we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking attention.”

  “Educate them in what way?”

  Avi closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Oh, shit, Randy, I could go on for hours—I have drawn up a whole curriculum.”

  “Okay, we’ll get into that later.”

  “Definitely later. For now, the key point is that the Crypt is all-important. I can take all of my ideas and put them into a single pod of information, but almost every government in the world would prevent distribution to its citizens. It is essential to build the Crypt so that the HEAP can be freely distributed throughout the world.”

  “HEAP?”

  “Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “This is the true meaning of what you are working on,” Avi says, “and so I urge you not to lose heart. Whenever you are about to get bored stamping out those license plates in the Philippines, think of the HEAP. Think of what
those Nahuatl villagers could have done to those fucking Aztecs if they’d had a holocaust prevention manual—a handbook on guerilla warfare tactics.”

  Randy sits and ponders for a while. “We have to go and buy some water,” he finally says. “I’ve sweated away a few liters just sitting here.”

  “We can just go back to the hotel,” Avi says, “I’m basically finished.”

  “You’re finished. I haven’t even started,” Randy says.

  “Started what?”

  “Telling you why there’s no chance I’m going to be bored in the Philippines.”

  Avi blinks. “You met a girl?”

  “No!” Randy says testily, meaning Yes, of course. “Come on, let’s go.”

  They go to a nearby 24 Jam and purchase bluish plastic bottles of water the size of cinderblocks. Then they wander around through streets crowded with unbearably savory-smelling food carts, guzzling the water.

  “I got e-mail from Doug Shaftoe a few days ago,” Randy says. “From his boat, via satellite phone.”

  “In the clear?”

  “Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e-mail, but he won’t.”

  “That is really unprofessional,” Avi grumbles. “He needs to be more paranoid.”

  “He’s so paranoid that he doesn’t even trust Ordo.”

  Avi’s scowl eases. “Oh. That’s okay then.”

  “His e-mail contained a stupid joke about Imelda Marcos.”

  “You took me on this walk to tell me a joke?”

  “No, no, no,” Randy says. “The joke was a prearranged signal. Doug told me that he would send me e-mail containing an Imelda joke if a certain thing happened.”

  “What certain thing?”

  Randy takes a big swig of water, draws a deep breath, and composes himself. “More than a year ago, I had a conversation with Doug Shaftoe during that big party that the Dentist threw on board the Rui Faleiro. He wanted us to hire his company, Semper Marine Services, to do the survey work on all future cable lays. In return he offered to cut us in on any sunken treasure he found while performing the survey.”